1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication apparatus and a communication method for transmitting and receiving data through an established communication.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a technique of connecting apparatuses by wireless communication such as a wireless universal serial bus (W-USB) standard, and transmitting and receiving data has become common. With the connection of the apparatuses using such wireless communication, a user can instruct printing of data from a portable terminal apparatus mounted with a communication unit such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth™, a wireless local area network (LAN), the W-USB, in addition to a portable telephone network to a printer that also has a same communication unit through non-contact communication. Therefore, the above connection is highly convenient.
Because the data is transmitted and received by wireless, the instruction to print the data using the above wireless communication needs to identify the output destination of the data when a plurality of printers that are capable of accepting the instruction to print from the portable terminal apparatus are present. For W-USB, a process called “association” is executed in advance and, thereby, the setting information necessary for establishing communication such as the ID of each apparatus and information on the key are exchanged between the apparatuses that execute the communication. The setting information stored in each apparatus due to this process enables the identification of the output destination.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-362523 proposes, as to a storage apparatus that communicates with an information apparatus by wireless, a technique of enabling exclusion of users not undoubtedly having access authorization using inerasable authentication information by storing authentication information necessary for identifying a user in a read only memory (ROM) area.
When setting information obtained in the association of W-USB or the authentication information such as the one in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-362523 is stored in a storing apparatus, the number of pieces of information that can be stored in a storing apparatus is limited because the capacity of the storing apparatus that is the storage destination is limited.
However, in the method of Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-362523, the case where the number of pieces of authentication information reaches the upper limit storable number is not taken into account and, therefore, a problem has arisen that normal communication with an information apparatus that requests connection after number of pieces of information reaches the upper limit number can not be executed. When the number of pieces of information reaches the upper limit number, a measure can be considered of, for example, deleting authentication information not used. However, according to Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-362523, even such a measure can not be taken because the authentication information is basically stored in the inerasable ROM area.
When the stored information is deleted, it is desirable, for example, to judge whether the information is not used as above or whether the information is used at low frequency, and to control to leave the necessary information stored.